Thursday, January 31, 2002

"Have a nice day. From Damage, Inc." An apparent massacre by U. S. Special Operations forces in the town of Oruzgan has been reported by the New York Times but seems not to have offended anyone. Are massacres not important anymore?

Wednesday, January 30, 2002

The United States has entered a 30-year time warp. Dick Cheney is channelling Tricky Dick Nixon, 'stonewalling' on the release of information on his meetings with Enron, just as Nixon tried to keep his infamous tapes under wraps. At the same time, the American military in Afghanistan is doing a bloody reenactment of the My Lai massacre.

Monday, January 28, 2002

Under the 'periphery doctrine', Israel tried to find friends in countries to the outside of the enemy countries which surround it. These have included Turkey, Ethiopia and Iran. Why, then, is Israel encouraging the Americans to make Iran the next victim of the 'war on terrorism'? Remember that Iran is being blamed as the source of the weapons on the Karine A, and is being accused by the Americans of trying to destabilize Afghanistan. (Also remember that, unlike President Bush, President Khatami was actually democratically elected!)

The Great Game: 'to insert Afghanistan into Pipelineistan'. I wonder if the author is right in stating that Iraq is safe from the Americans as Iraq serves as the excuse for American military bases in the Middle East to 'protect' the sheikhs from the evil Saddam. (The first part of this article lists the pre-9-11 meetings on how to de-Taliban-ize Afghanistan.)

Israeli commandos recently seized a ship called the 'Karine A', along with the 50 tons of weapons it had on board. Israel immediately claimed that these weapons were coming from Iran and were intended for the Palestinian Authority, and that the ship was owned by the Palestinian Authority. Both Israel and the United States seized on this to derail any attempts to continue with any peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Indeed, the most vocal Israelis seem to want to use the Karine A as the coup de grace for Yasser Arafat. However, a suspicious mind might note: 1) the United States, which apparently 'assisted' the Israelis in apprehending the Karine A, has a long history of manufacturing false evidence against its foes (the Maine, Tonkin Gulf, Kuwaiti incubator babies, 9-11); 2) there are severe problems with the Israeli assertion that the Karine A is owned by the Palestinian Authority; 3) while I admit that there is hardly any dumber group of people than the Palestinian Authority, it is difficult to believe that they would think that they could move that many weapons by boat in the extremely heavily monitored Red Sea, not to mention the logistical difficulties in getting through the Suez Canal and moving the larger weapons in the Palestine itself; 4) the speed with which the Israelis and Americans pounced on this incident to isolate Arafat, without any real evidence to connect the ship to the Palestinian Authority except for the testimony of the captain, suggests that it is being used for its propaganda value (the almost unanimous acceptance by the American press of the Israeli version of the facts in this case is telling, especially given the real paucity of hard facts available). Sharon seems to have decided that the time is ripe to finally rid himself of his archenemy Arafat, and it seems to suit the Americans to keep the conflict burning at its hottest, presumably to allow for convenient excuses for American military involvement whenever and wherever they should deem appropriate.

The updated Michael C. Ruppert timeline on the 9-11 terrorism. If you can read all this and still believe the mythology put out by the Bush administration you probably also believe that Enron didn't get anything for all the money it gave to Bush and his pals.

Hugo Chavez is trying to do good things in Venezuela. He is also annoying the United States, and receivingunfavorablecomments in the Americanpress. What seems to be saving him thus far is the fact that his rhetoric isn't matched by any real threat to the supply of oil to the United States. Venezuelan oil is so important to the Americans that they are presumably loathe to risk the security of supply by creating some form of fake CIA 'revolution' to replace Chavez. Without the oil he would presumably have been 'allende-d' by now.

Wednesday, January 23, 2002

This report on the source of the recent anthrax attacks in the United States seems to have been written by a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. It will be interesting to see if her 'Possible Portrait of the Anthrax Perpetrator' turns out to be on the money.

Sunday, January 20, 2002

The rather lackadaisical approach of the United States in capturing bin Laden in the last few years probably is due to the fact that the CIA, along with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, helped get him into the terrorism business, and both Pakistan (because they liked the bin Laden support for Kashmiri terrorists) and Saudi Arabia (because they were embarassed at having connections come out between the Saudi government and bin Laden) were less than keen on seeing him captured.

The United States has used the 9-11 terrorism to do many things: 1) to fight a new type of colonialist war in the guise of rooting out terrorism; 2) to shore up the shaky reign of the man 'elected' as the representative of the neo-liberals; 3) to institutionalize American unilateralism in foreign affairs, and simultaneously remove any uncertainty of the right of the United States to intervene in third world countries; 4) to remove domestic civil rights that could be used to protest neo-liberalism; and 5) to answer generally the legitimacy crisis facing the globalist agenda prior to 9-11.

The Cold War, which was a joint creation of ideologues in the Soviet Union and the United States, is sorely missed by those who benefited most from it. There seems to be a movement in the United States to replace it with the 'Green Peril', a worldwide battle of the U. S. against fundamentalist Islam. This article show how wrong this new idea is, and how it has already messed up proper American relations with such countries as Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran and Algeria.

What is going to happen to Israel when Palestinians make up the majority of the Israeli population? Differing birth rates means that this will happen in the foreseeable future. Could Israel be acting the way it is, i.e., brutally, while hiding its worst brutality from its own people, in order to make conditions worse and worse for the Palestinians? This would provoke more and more violent Palestinian response, and eventually lead to the Israelis claiming that Palestinians in Israel proper have to be expelled for 'security reasons'.

Saturday, January 19, 2002

The Republicans seem to think that they can't be seen to be corrupt in the Enron disaster because they did nothing to bail out Enron when it started to flounder. Isn't their failure to bail out Enron evidence of the fact that their total corruption in the rise of Enron made it politically impossible to do anything about Enron when Enron needed help? Isn't their political inability to do anything to prevent the largest bankruptcy in U. S. history evidence of the fact that they have allowed their corruption to become so great that they are prevented from properly governing the country? Isn't that the real scandal of Enron and the Republicans?

The new American colonialism is probably being directed by Dick Cheney, holed up in his bunker with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a gaggle of oil geologists. Cheney is looking for the 'sweet spots', which have the following four characteristics: 1) a civilian population which can be bombed into the stone age (this is almost irrelevant to the war, but is great for the military contractors who sell the bombs); 2) a group of combatants who can be used as a proxy army directed by covert U. S. agents to fight the ground war and avoid politically unacceptable U. S. casualties; 3) some sort of semi-plausible connection to bin Laden to serve as an excuse; and 4) an area which is sitting on a lot of petrochemicals which aren't being exploited by U. S. oil companies either due to the unsettled political situation or due to the negotiating position of the current government.

John Walker Lindh is an interesting victim of the new American colonialism. He was seeking something in his life, and turned to Islam. This led him to study with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Unbeknownst to him, the Taliban were negotiating with the United States regarding the building of an oil pipeline. The Taliban naively didn't believe the U. S. threats that unless the Taliban gave in and accepted the U. S. position, the U. S. would obtain what it wanted through war. Lindh was studying with a group who were, at the time, almost an ally of the United States (the Taliban received millions of dollars in U. S. aid in the spring, and were an on-going negotiating partner of the U. S.). All the while, the U. S. planned to replace the Taliban with the Northern Alliance, and used the 9-11 terrorist attacks to create a very flimsy excuse for attacking the Taliban (claim without evidence that bin Laden did it, then attack the Taliban for 'harboring' bin Laden). Suddenly, Lindh finds himself in an army that is in a war with the U. S. What is he supposed to do? He's in Afghanistan, with nowhere to go. If he tries to desert or refuses to fight, they will kill him. Apparently he expressly refused to fight against American forces, and fought, if he fought at all, against the Northern Alliance. The new American colonialism involves dropping lots of bombs on civilians while using proxies to fight the ground wars. The proxies are directed by covert U. S. agents. Lindh, in fighting the Northern Alliance, may have unwittingly been fighting Americans (whose military status was closer to espionage agents than soldiers). When he is captured, he is interrogated by CIA agents, who were almost certainly committing war crimes (not to mention the as yet uninvestigated war crimes involved in the U. S.-British-Northern Alliance slaughter of most of his co-detainees). Lindh is then treated as a 'battlefield detainee', not a prisoner of war, and presumably treated so badly that his 'confessions' are worthless (just think about it - almost all the people he was captured with were bombed and slaughtered in front of his eyes and his subsequent 'confessions' to the same people are supposed to be voluntary?). The geopolitical games of the new colonialism played by the United States shifted the ground right under Lindh's feet (is the perfidity of U. S. foreign policy a defense to criminal charges?) and put him in an impossible situation.

Thursday, January 17, 2002

It is almost certain that the American flouting of the Geneva Convention is going to come back to haunt American soldiers at some time in the future. You would think that real soldiers in the Pentagon (if there are any, or are they all now 'entrepreneurs'?) would have more respect for the laws of war, and would rein in the excesses of the Bush regime.

The Republicans should be caught on the horns of a dilemma in the Enron debacle. Either they are shown as a party owned and controlled by big business, or they try to argue that, since both parties received lots of Enron money, the corruption is bipartisan and as much a problem for the Democrats as for them. Given the extreme bias of Enron in giving money to Republicans over Democrats, it should be almost impossible for Republicans to claim that it is a bipartisan problem, but they seem to be doing it anyway and may get away with it. If they succeed in making this argument, however, all they do is prove that the whole system is corrupted by the current campaign finance rules, and prove that campaign finance reform is essential. Since they benefit more from the current corruption than the Democrats do, they have a problem.

Was there no communication between the cockpits of the 9-11 aircraft and air control towers while the terrorists were obtaining control of the aircraft? If there was any communication, there must be recordings of the conversations (and air traffic controllers or other pilots who heard or participated in them).

Monday, January 14, 2002

The Japanese economy is about to take a high dive largely because of uncollectible loans made by Japanese banks to companies controlled by the Japanese mafia, the Yakuza. Political will to fix the problem is lacking because the politicians are dependent on the same gangsters for much of their campaign funding, and the bureaucrats and police are also often corrupted by their need to seek employment after their jobs in government are over in companies owned or controlled by the gangsters.

The United States may be planning to pick onSomalianext, raising the obvious question: Does Somalia have oil? Some say no, others say yes. In any event it is clear that large oil companies had obtained concessions to look for oil in Somalia, which they were unable to do because of the warlordism that has plagued Somalia. The infamous 'Black Hawk Down' incident, which occured during Clinton's presidency, took place in the course of the operation that was planned in the administration of George H. W. Bush. Some feel that the reason for that operation was to stabilize the political situation in Somalia enough to allow the oil companies to explore and exploit their concessions. Somalia is another country where American oil companies have interests they cannot develop because of an unsatisfactory political situation, where it is thought that the country cannot defend itself against an American attack, where there are numerous tribes (not to mention the Ethiopians) who might be glad to do the American's ground war for them, and where a semi-plausible case can be made that terrorists have lived in the area. Is it any wonder that Somalia is nervous?

Three members of the Canadian Edible Ballot Society have been charged with, well, eating their ballots (I don't know if they ate their subpoenas!). This was a protest against the lack of genuine democracy in Canada, and I have no idea why Elections Canada is making such a big deal out of it. If Elections Canada wanted to do something useful, it could write some legislation providing limits on the maximum amount that anyone can contribute to a candidate or political party, limits that are sadly lacking now. It might also think about providing some restrictions on the party leader elections for Canadian political parties, elections which are extremely important in the Canadian political system but which are often, if not always, very corrupt.

The Hell's Angels biker gang had a sort of convention in Toronto, so crazy Mel Lastman, the mayor of Toronto, went over to meet and greet them. Can the keys of the city be far behind? Whenever a bunch of murderous thugs decides to move into a new city, who better to welcome them than the mayor?

Sunday, January 13, 2002

The thicket of ties between the Bush administration, big oil and oil-related companies (Chevron, Unocal, Enron, Haliburton), the Taliban, the new interim Prime Minister of Afghanistan(Karzai), the Bush administration's new Special Envoy for Afghanistan(Khalilzad), the CIA, and Pakistan's ISI are nothing short of amazing. Are we to believe that this war had nothing to do with the pipeline when both Karzai and Khalilzad were actively involved in planning it?

Saturday, January 12, 2002

Peter Dale Scott has an outstanding website on the Afghanistan situation. It is worth remembering the rogue bank BCCI, and how it connected with powerful people in both the United States and the Middle East. It is in particular worth considering the role of bin-Mahfouz in BCCI, and his connections to George W. Bush. Once we digest the importance of pipelines, poppies and Presidents, all will become clear!

Friday, January 11, 2002

Bush is ending the Clinton administration's program to encourage the auto manufacturers to produce high fuel mileage cars and replacing it with a long-term program to develop cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. This is being spun as an environmental action against the interests of the oil companies. Nothing could be further from the truth. The best way to reduce pollution and global warming and politically unwise reliance on dodgy supplies of petrochemicals is to increase the fuel efficiency of vehicles (particularly, stop exempting SUV's from mandated average minimum limits per manufacturer on miles per gallon). This Bush trick just delays the reduction in oil consumption by years. Even if fuel cells were available now, they are not some magical device that produces non-polluting energy out of the air. They are in effect batteries, storage devices that store energy using hydrogen. Where do you get the hydrogen? You either get it from petrochemicals or manufacture it using another source of energy. You may gain a benefit if that source of energy is say, wind power, or if your hydrogen manufacturing and the energy used in manufacturing the fuel cells is less than the energy used in internal combustion engines. Everyone agrees, however, that the production of commercially useful fuel cells is years away. In the meantime Bush's oily pals can continue to make the big profits they would be denied if the old Clinton plan had been allowed to continue. If Bush were serious about the environment, he would maintain the old plan and introduce a new plan to develop fuel cells.

Thursday, January 10, 2002

What is happening to Greenpeace? Its former head, Lord Melchett, is now working for the infamousP. R.firmBurson-Marsteller, a firm that represents some of the most prominent polluters on the planet. In a plea bargain in the trespass case of 17 of its protesters against U. S. missile defence tests, Greenpeace has agreed to an injunction preventing its activists trespassing on military bases either in the United States or on the Marshall Islands. Have they decided to just sell out and give up?

ZacariasMoussaoui is an unusual terrorist, if he is a terrorist at all. He came to the attention of the FBI when it was reported that he wanted to learn to fly a 747 but not learn to take off or land, and otherwise acted oddly and conspicuously. The FBI, of course, ignored the information until after 9-11. Why would he act to bring attention to himself when the whole point of the al-Qaeda organization appears to be to operate quietly and secretly in 'sleeper' cells until the moment of attack? Maybe he wanted to get out of the suicide mission and acted to get himself arrested in order to avoid suicide while not obviously chickening out (the fact that he was a very bad flying student and didn't actually end up on a terrorist plane may point to this as well). Maybe the person acting oddly and conspicuously was someone pretending to be him, setting him up as a suspect who was supposed to die on one of the terrorist planes but be identified after the fact as a terrorist bomber due to his easily remembered words and actions.

Tuesday, January 08, 2002

Kissinger seems to have a gift for giving the 'green light' to dictators who sought comfort from the U. S. that it wouldn't get upset if the dictators started to do awful things to their own citizens. We're starting to obtain evidence of his remarkable diplomatic gifts with respect to Chile, Indonesia, and now, Argentina. You'd almost think there was a pattern here.

The CIA really fouled up in its failure to foresee the 9-11 attack (unless you are one of those conspiracy nuts who think that it didn't fail to foresee but simply failed to tell anybody). When JFK got really mad at the CIA largely for its messing around in Cuba, he started to try to rein it in and many feel that his reward for so doing was assassination. Who in the U. S. government would be brave enough to tangle with it again?

It is possible that more people will die as a result of toxins in the air as a result of the 9-11 crashes than died immediately as a result of the building collapses. Can anything be done to keep extremely toxic materials out of the building materials of new buildings, especially as official American government policy seems to be to provoke more terrorist attacks?

Monday, January 07, 2002

Unocal and Bridas, an Argentinian company bought by Amoco and thus now part of British Petroleum Amoco, have been battling to control the Afghanistan oil pipeline for yearsandyears, negotiating with both Pakistan and the Taliban. Has Tony Blair committed Britain to the Afghan oil war to ensure that Bridas/Amoco/BP Amoco gets its piece of the pie rather than have it all go to Unocal? Is it going too far to suggest that the Afghan oil war had to be fought because the bitter rivalry between Unocal and Bridas made a negotiated agreement with the Taliban to build the pipeline impossible?

There are lots of links here on the future oil pipeline for which a lot of people are dying in Afghanistan. I particularly liked this article, which points out the tribal conflicts within Saudi Arabia, and in particular how some of the terrorists may come from families based in the south of Saudi Arabia.

There was probably a war crime committed by the Northern Alliance and the United States in Qalai Janghi in Mazar-i-Sharif. Will it ever be investigated? It is ironic to compare it to My Lai where Colin Powell, of all people, first made a name for himself by 'managing' this huge PR problem for the U. S. military so adeptly that he was identified as a rising star on a path that eventually led to where he is today.

An Arab-American Secret Service agent is removed from a flight by the pilot of the American Airlines plane. American Airlines claims his paperwork was not in order while the agent seems to be saying that he was singled out because of his ethnicity, the dreaded 'racial profiling'. Even Bush has weighed in on the side of the agent. This is all very odd. Do you think that a Secret Service agent working to guard the President would raise a stink over something like this without the permission of the President? He might spend the rest of his career looking for counterfeit two dollar bills in Nome, Alaska. I know the Secret Service hasn't been able to do their job properly from JFK to Buddy, but wouldn't they know how to fill out the paperwork to get on a plane? The whole thing looks like a set-up - the airline can appear to be doing its job while Bush can pander to the Arab-American vote.

Friday, January 04, 2002

What if bin Laden hides himself in a religious institution in Mecca, and announces to the world that Mecca will be his new base for world-wide terror? Any attempts by the Saudis or the Americans to arrest or kill him in such a sacred place would lead to such unrest in Saudi Arabia and all other Islamic countries that the world supply of oil would probably be decimated, followed by all world stock markets.

How can it be that flight data and voice recorders from all the terrorist flights on 9-11 were not found or were unreadable, except for one cockpit voice recorder that is not being released supposedly to spare the feelings of the families of the crash victims? What is the point of having various 'black box' recorders if they cannot survive a crash? The FBI supposedly found information which helped them to identify the terrorists in the wreckage, information contained on scraps of paper, but the 'black boxes' were destroyed. This is preposterous, and indicates that they are hiding something.

Thursday, January 03, 2002

An odd idea is starting to crawl up out of the internet. You can't find it written in any oneplace, but can get a feel for it by readingvariousarticles. Could it be that the American government was instrumental in training the 9-11 terrorists (and other 'sleeper' agents)? Let's say a big American arms manufacturer wants to sell expensive and sophisticated military equipment to, say, Saudi Arabia (just to pick a country randomly out of the air). The Saudis are keen to spend lots of that oil money, but raise the objection that their military men don't have the training to operate the complex equipment. So the arms manufacturer pays a visit to some generals in the Pentagon, and suggests that it might be a good idea to invite some of the military from our allies to U. S. training facilities to foster international cooperation and goodwill. The generals in the Pentagon are keen on the idea as they intend to become millionaires working for the arms manufacturers after they retire. Invitations are made, training is done, and most of the Saudis return home to operate the fancy equipment. Just another example of how cooperation between allies and between the Pentagon and arms manufacturers is a win-win situation for all. But what happened to those Saudis who didn't return home . . . ?

The list of U. S. unilateralism is scary. How can Americans continue to be surprised to find that the elites in other countries don't like them? Other countries continue to cooperate with the U. S. solely because of respect for American power. It will be interesting to see what happens when U. S. power starts to wane under the combined assault of the Euro (giving the world an alternative reserve currency which some bankers may opt for just out of a distaste for the U. S.) and the never-ending war policies of the Bush junta.

The many faces of bin Laden: the tape released by the Bush administration is obviously not the same guy. The question then becomes: is the Bush administration trying to fool the world or was it the victim of an Afghan joke?

Wednesday, January 02, 2002

Tuesday, January 01, 2002

This is interesting background on the Taliban. The Taliban took over Afghanistan by paying bribes to buy the fealty of local warlords. Their recent retreat was based on the bribing of the same warlords by the Northern Alliance. Once the Americans turn their attentions elsewhere, the Taliban, or the same people with another name, could quite easily return by simply bribing the warlords to turn their allegiance back to the Taliban.

Newspapers are starting to pick up the story of the odd relationship between the Bush junta and the Taliban, and the fact that bin Laden seems to have been sheltered from FBI investigation by friends in high places.